Islamic Activists: The Anti-Enlightenment Democrats
168
Islamic Activists: The Anti-Enlightenment Democrats
168Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Explaining and comparing Islamist ideas, including those about leadership, justice and minority rights, Abdelkader explains how these have been represented in the writings of important historical and contemporary Islamists. In doing so, Abdelkader reveals that democracy is not the sole preserve of those who support Enlightenment values, offering the reader a chance to understand the populist non-violent side of Islamic activism. This includes an examination of the ideas of the leaders of the populist Islamist movements in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745322162 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 05/04/2011 |
| Pages: | 168 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Deina Ali Abdelkader has taught at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Tufts University and Cairo University. She is a member of the Islamic Jurisprudential Council of North America and an executive committee member of Religion and Politics in the American Political Science Association (2004-6). She is the author of Islamic Activists (Pluto, 2011).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction Orientalism, Islamic Activism and Rational Thought?
Historical events have regularly shifted the normative bases for the study of Islamic activism. For example, the stance of scholars and the public towards Islamic activism following the 1979 Iranian Revolution was quite different from that during the Afghan resistance to the Russian occupation. The events of September 11, 2001, precipitated yet another tectonic shift in attitudes toward Islamic activism. Once again, public construction of Islamic activism as monolithic — and, in this case, malevolent — challenges any nuanced study of Islamic movements.
Scholars must revitalize research agendas to discern differences among movements and leaders. Furthermore, it is essential to recognize the importance of moderate Islamic activists who are reshaping and redefining certain views and legal precepts in the Islamic faith. The age of scientific revolution in Europe came hand in hand with an assumed supremacy of rational thought. The West equated modernity with all things rational. Hence the divergence in today's world between Islamic thought (contemporary and classical) and the constructs of Western modernity.
For example, Ernest Gellner (1992) writes about being an "Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalist" as opposed to an "Islamic Fundamentalist". In his writing, he emphasizes that
Sociologists have long entertained and frequently endorsed the theory of secularization. It runs as follows: [in] the scientific-industrial society, religious faith and observance decline. One can give intellectualist reasons for this: the doctrines of religion are in conflict with those of science, which in turn are endowed with enormous prestige, and which constitute the basis of modern technology, and thereby also of modern economy. Therefore, religious faith declines. Its prestige goes down as the prestige of its rival rises.
(Gellner 1992: 4)
The binary division between rational versus irrational has continuously represented the strongest point of contention between Western and Islamic thought. The Islamists' call for a return to sharia law, or for following the days of "al-Salaf al-Salih" (the righteous predecessors) has been assumed to mean a return to a historical golden age, an idea that reeks of romanticism, the arch-opponent of rationalist thought and the very symbol of irrationality.
This binary view of the rational versus the irrational, the Western versus the Islamic, the modern versus the traditional, has led to isolation and detachment in the contemporary analysis of Islamic political movements. However, more importantly — as I am arguing in this book — it has also dismissed the argumentation methods and the use of human reason that Islamic jurisprudential thought has left as a legacy. Fiqh is a relevant if not crucial part of contemporary Muslim society whether it is political or apolitical in nature.
Roxanne Euben's Enemy in the Mirror critiques the Western theoretical discourse for its total disregard for the relevance of metaphysics in contemporary political life (Euben 1999: 14). Euben states:
For the reflex to dismiss fundamentalism as irrational or pathological is not merely a product of the almost habitualized prejudices and fears operative in the relationship between 'the West' and 'Islam' but, as I have argued, also a function of the way a post-Enlightenment, predominantly rationalist tradition of scholarship countenances foundationalist political practices in the modern world.
(Euben 1999: 14)
Euben's contribution and purpose in her book centers on the argument that fundamentalism is becoming more rather than less powerful, and that those who are worried about the challenge fundamentalists pose to liberal or democratic theory assume that fundamentalism signifies the resurgence of the irrational, the stubborn persistence of archaic and particularistic, or the veil that masks what are essentially structural tensions. Such stories function ultimately to discredit adherents as fanatical lunatics or agents of regressive chaos, or to reduce fundamentalist ideas to mere conduits; they all miss the opportunity to understand the appeals of fundamentalism (Euben 1999: 15).
I would like to take Euben's concerns a step further by arguing that not only is the Enlightenment fixation affecting our understanding of modern Islamic movements and their appeal, but that this fixation is also limiting, if not obliterating, a practical and serious discussion of Islamic legal and political literature.
Euben recounts that the study of Islamic activism is continuously subjugated to an analysis of the Islamic activist's political behavior, while there is a total detachment in this analysis from how the fundamentalists (activists) themselves understand and describe their actions (Euben 1999: 24).
In studying Islamic Activism, one finds there is very little literature that explains the current Islamic discourse on change. Euben indicates that scholars have intentionally refused to analyze Islamic political theory because of a Western aversion to all things Islamic. This rejection stems from the aversion also to anything religious, as opposed to our contemporary Cartesian Enlightenment "truths". That unwillingness to understand and explain the Islamic vision of the state and Islamic peoples' aspirations for Muslim society has led to the current failure in communication with "the Other".
Thus, every time we are faced with Islamists winning elections in a certain country or with Islamists who get involved in terrorist acts, we have no threshold knowledge to provide us with the analytical and logical tools to comprehend current issues in Muslim societies. The logical question then about Islamic Activism is: If there is change, what will this change entail? As Butterworth notes in his article "Prudence versus Legitimacy" (1982), there are no progressive steps towards an understanding of how social institutions will function beyond rallying popular support, thus indicating the need for a "third wave of thinkers" to address the particular details of justice according to Islamic law (Butterworth 1982: 110).
Butterworth's call for clarity is a concern for a number of researchers on Islamic Activism, for example, Haddad stresses that the challenging task is to understand "change to what?" (Haddad 1991: 7).
Esposito criticizes the Islamic Activists' focus on the failures of the incumbent governments, rather than "defining the nature of an Islamic state and its institutions" (Esposito 1992: 99).
Post September 11, 2001, literature on Islamist ideology is still miniscule. Who are, for example, Qaradawi, Ghannouchi, and Yassine? What are their visions of an Islamic state? These are the questions that this book will answer. It is critical to understand these leaders' aspirations before being able to project and analyze the contemporary Islamists' discourse. This understanding is necessary because it helps differentiate terrorist versus pacifist Islamists and it also sheds light on the kind of debate and rhetoric that even terrorists read and use in our contemporary world. As Haddad, Esposito and others emphasize: Regardless of the Islamic activists differences, all agree on the need to implement Islamic law. However, as Haddad notes (Haddad 1991: 53): "they differ in what they wish to implement. Conservatives tend to regard much of the corpus of the traditional Islamic law as binding. Reformers note that the law is subject to reinterpretation 'al-ijtihad' and reform."
The works of contemporary Islamic reformists are precisely what this book will address in its effort to analyze and explain their visions and blueprints for an Islamic state.
The assumption that reason and secularism are determinative to an aspiring democracy, in Western liberal thought, necessitates an analysis of the literature. Therefore, the book will analyze whether reason and faith are mutually exclusive in the populist Islamic discourse. The analysis of Islamists writings concerning faith and reason will therefore determine whether secularism is a prerequisite for establishing a democracy.
OLD CONSTRUCTS IN A NEW WORLD
In the midst of the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis, Western publics, the Western media, and even some scholars saw Islamic activists as violent, unreasoning enemies. Whether such blanket vilification was morally acceptable is not the concern of this study. More significant for subsequent events was the dehumanization of activist Iranians that blinded the West to the populist aspect of the revolution. This inability to understand the populist element underlying the events in Iran led to the West's incomprehension as to the motives behind the September 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent public demonstrations of seemingly murderous satisfaction in the East. Al-Qaeda and its leaders do not represent populist Islamic movements. However, the political powerlessness of moderate Islamists has enabled the influence of violent Islamic groups to grow.
Cold War paradigms of confrontation were useless to US leaders in meeting the challenge of violent Islamic groups. The bipolarity of the international system dominating the post-war period was based on shifting alliances that gave some nations with little power of their own (such as Egypt and Indonesia) disproportionate political roles in international relations. With the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and consolidation of the US as the unopposed global hegemon, less powerful nations have fewer opportunities to form alliances that will improve their fortunes and influence. The frustration engendered by a hegemonic power impervious to the influence of other nations provides a rich medium for the growth of Islamic activism.
The Cold War paradigm recognized modern nation states as the sole actors on the international stage. But in the last 20 years, ethnic and religious cleavages have challenged the internal cohesion of nation-states. Stateless, often transboundary nations, have asserted their rights and identities; non-state actors, such as Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, have become game-changing players in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Both trends have led to severe rifts in the composition of nation-states that previously characterized twentieth century, particularly post-World War Two, politics.
From this perspective, the US bombing of Afghanistan had minimal impact on "the enemy" — very different from what it might have had in a Cold War scenario. Also, in requesting that Saudi Arabia change its religious education curricula, US leaders were seen to be arrogantly dictating to a sovereign state. Such high-handed tactics diminish the advance of Western interests in the Muslim world. More dangerously, the alienation of Saudi Arabians plays right into the hands of Bin Laden and his like.
Clearly, a foreign policy that relies on archaic Cold War analyses is inadequate to current challenges. To comprehend the dynamics of Islamic populist movements and the new international landscape of players and actors, the contemporary international political milieu needs to make an analytical, if not a paradigmatic, shift..
This study is designed to reconstruct this landscape to include the voices of several populist Islamic leaders. The clarification of their positions and motives offers important insights into critical social and political issues in the confrontation between Islamists and the West.
First and foremost, it is necessary to clarify and define what I mean by "populist Islamists". In the roughly two decades between the 1979 Iranian revolution and September 11, 2001, political perception of Islamic activists shifted and changed. The revolution and subsequent seizure of US hostages in Tehran cast political Islam in a very negative light among Western media commentators, politicians, and even academics. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan shifted the normative view toward a conception favoring the "mujahideen" and their efforts against Russian forces. In this way, political events and alliances forced and informed perceptions of Islamists in popular culture, foreign relations, teaching, and research relating to Islamic movements.
During this period, terms such as the "green peril", "clash of civilizations", and the historical view that "Islam has bloody borders" (Huntington 1993: 34-35) became common in the literature on political Islam, activist movements, and their leaders. The events of 9/11 reinforced these trends in discussions of Islamic politics. Only a handful of scholars have been able to set aside those images and see the legitimacy and appeal of these groups to their fellow conationalists within their own civil societies.
Ten years later, there are still very few scholars who can see populist Islam as an expression of legitimate civil concerns. Populist Islamists are Islamic political leaders who are engaged in a dialogue with their respective societies. Their representations of the ideal political and social ethos are legitimate in the eyes of their constituents. In their writing and other political expression, populist Islamists are largely interpreters of civil grievances and definers of ideal governance.
Populist Islamists had long been active in the region. Hassan al-Banna's Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, grew rapidly in the Middle East, soon transcending its boundaries as far as Pakistan and Indonesia. This movement attracted attention when it began to mobilise the population against British rule. Recruitment of Muslim Brothers was fueled largely by resistance to the British occupation of Egypt at the time. This anti-colonialist movement inspired other political nationalist forces against foreign occupation. It is my goal in this book therefore to focus on Islamists who have a foot in both realms: The political (practical) as well as theoretical (ideological) realm.
I have selected Qaradawi as a contemporary ideological leader of the Muslim Brothers, the first Islamic politically active group in the Middle East (established in 1928). The second activist is Ghannouchi of Tunisia because both Qaradawi and Ghannouchi are intellectuals who have participated in organized political activism and they both have engaged in creating and sharing with the masses their view of an "ideal" Islamic state. My third example of Islamic activist writing is Yassine of Morocco who, like Qaradawi and Ghannouchi, is simultaneously a prolific author and an activist.
A second reason for choosing these three Islamists is their popularity amongst the masses in their respective societies as well as their knowledge and ability to conduct their political discourse in a "moderate" spirit. That is to say, they all engage in deciphering Islamic mores and canons from a liberal/moderate perspective, following human reasoning when applicable like a historial figure called Shatibi that I mention later in this book.
A third reason is a logistical one in that, like many other researchers, the availability and accessibility of the works of these Islamists facilitated my selection in terms of finding appropriate materials upon which to conduct and base my research.
Very few studies elaborate on contemporary political Islamists; those that do include AzzamTamimi (2001), John Esposito and John Voll (2001), Hakan Yavuz (2003) and Noah Feldman (2004, 2008). Of these, an even smaller group of scholars focuses on those Islamic activists who bridge the political/practice arena and the scholar/ideologue realm. Research on Muslim intellectuals has focused on thinkers such as Hassan Hanafi and Mohammed Emara, who are not practicing politicians. Analyses of Islamic activist leaders involved in both theory and practice realms are still marginal and rare.
One important reason for this unbalanced view is, as indicated earlier, the dominant influence of realpolitik on public and academic perceptions of Islamic activists. Fawaz Gerges's America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests (Gerges 1999) provides a detailed analysis of this problem. Another reason that moderate Islamic activists have not been widely included in the discourse on comparative democracy and political theory is that two powerful forces contend against thorough investigation of Islamic activism research.
First, the relationship of a hegemon to satellite countries exemplifies the Focaultian notion that knowledge is tied to power. If we accept this, "knowledge" is subservient to maintaining the status quo. Thus, the control of defining knowledge and its components is ultimately held by the hegemon. As Bernard Lewis comments in What Went Wrong? (2002): "Today, for the time being, as Ataturk recognized and as Indian computer scientists and Japanese high-tech companies appreciate the dominant civilization is Western, and Western standards therefore define modernity" (Lewis 2002: 150).
Second, any writings on moderate Islamists must contend with the hard line drawn during the Enlightenment between faith and reason. This idea, embedded in Western thought, deeply affects perceptions of Islamic activism. The research agendas of scholars writing on the topic are inevitably shaped by this accepted polarity. Gellner, for example, presents himself as an "Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalist" as opposed to an Islamic Fundamentalist.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Islamic Activists"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Deina Ali Abdelkader.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1 Orientalism, Islamic Activism and Rational Thought?2 The Rudiments of an Islamic Just Society: The Contribution of Abu-Ishaq al-Shatibi
3 Qaradawi: Modernization is Key
4 Ghannouchi: Minorities and Equality
5 Yassin: The Just Ruler
6 Reason and Faith: The Islamists versus the “Stillborn God”
Notes
Index